test blog 5

Coming to you live from my own desk and my own computer, from internet in our own place -- after my first full night's sleep in ten days. Yesterday was quite the day. The people who I hired to unload the truck arrived early, and unpacked the truck in record time. In fact, they would have put themselves out of a job, but we paid a four-hour minimum. After all, they may have turned down other work to do the unloading. Interesting story of how I found these guys. I posted ads on Craigslist and Kijiji: heard nothing. I contacted moving companies, but (a) they were based in Campbell River, and we'd have to pay for all the travel time, back and forth, and (b) they don't want to only unload, it's not worth their time. I even contacted a temp labour company, but they had no clients in Port Hardy. A kind Port Hardy resident saw my Craigslist ad and emailed with a suggestion: join the Port Hardy Buy/Sell/Trade Facebook group. I looked it up and sent a request to join. The Faceboo...

We are here! At our new home! Very excited! We had a reservation on the 10:15 ferry from Tsawwassen to Nanaimo, but we had to get there super early. If you get a lower berth, you cannot stay in the car -- which means we'd have to stay in the designated pet area with Diego. (You can leave your dog in the car by itself, but you know that's not gonna happen.) We wanted to make sure we had a spot on the upper deck, but you can't reserve that. This meant getting to the ferry very early. We were the second or third vehicle to check in, and M & SIL were right behind us in the truck. Waiting to board, we listened to the end of the Westlake book and an interview with David Yaffee, who wrote the recent biography of Joni Mitchell. That was notable mainly for our disagreements with the author. Eventually the boarding began. We happened to be parked right near the pet area. Turns out that is a little glass enclosure, about the size of an elevator, with a few built-in crates and two ...

Sicamous looked like a sweet little town, nestled on the shore of the Shuswap River, with mountains visible on two sides. We had breakfast at Grandma's and Grandpa's Family Restaurant. Most of the customers -- seniors at that time of day -- seemed to know each other and were talking very loudly. When I went to pay at the front, the woman said, "So where are you folks bound for now?" I said, "Port Hardy." She said, "That's an interesting place for a vacation." I said, smiling, "Actually, to live." "To live ? Now that's really interesting!" She looked eager, so I thought I'd pile it on. "Yes, relocating from Toronto." Her face lit up. "Oh my! Everyone will be very interested to hear this !" What a riot. The drive out of Sicamous towards Vancouver started out very scenic and lovely. When we reached the Coquihalla Highway, it started to rain lightly and was sometimes icy. We had been warned that thi...

It's very exciting to be past the mountains and in BC! We're having a really good time. It feels like we're on some kind of weird vacation where we don't do anything but drive and eat, and when we're done, we'll go back to where we live -- in Mississauga. Yesterday we had breakfast at an IHOP, then hit the road. It was cold, bright, and sunny. I had been checking weather conditions regularly, and there was no snow in the forecast at any location on the route. From other people's photos, I knew at some point, leaving Calgary, we'd be on a straight, flat highway with the mountains in front of us. It was exciting to get our first glimpse of the Canadian Rockies! The drive through the mountains was spectacularly scenic. All the evergreens were laced with snow, or sometimes covered in ice. And the snowy trees seemed to go on forever in all directions, undulating hills upon hills of snow-covered trees. Behind the trees, huge walls of brown rock jutting into th...

Greetings from Mountain Time! I had a friend from Denver who always said Mountain was the forgotten time zone. He may have been right: we forgot about the hour time difference until we saw the time on a bank sign. On the way out of Swift Current, the highway was a bit slippery, not from recent snow, but from compacted snow and ice that hadn't been cleared. We saw a few trucks in the median that had slipped off the road; we did have to drive a bit more carefully, but nothing scary. The land looked more like ranch and grazing land than farmland, and we did see a lot of cows and some buffalo. I'm glad to see them out eating grass the way they should be. I spotted a few animal crossings, the tunnels built under highways. The land was also less flat, with low, rolling hills, but still unbroken to the horizon. There were looong stretches without a town in sight. We listened to more Dortmunder -- we're both getting a little bored and want the book to end soon -- and coordinated th...

Greetings from the prairies! Yesterday was a good day. I fell asleep super early the night before, had a great sleep, then another amazing breakfast, this one at Smitty's, next door to the hotel. Then we hopped in the car, put it in cruise control, and went back to the Donald Westlake book. In northern Ontario I couldn't listen to a book while driving, but in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, it's a breeze. Allan and I both find the landscape fascinating. The highway is a straight black ribbon in the middle of a vast expanse of land, stretching to the horizon in all directions. The sky is huge . For long stretches of time, the only buildings you see are grain elevators, and the occasional clumps of trees planted as a windbreak around a farmhouse. The fields are mostly covered in snow, although it doesn't seem deep. Sometimes on first impression, we couldn't tell if an area was a snow-covered field or a frozen lake, that's how flat everything is. It looks like we won...

If you are following along, you might want to check comments, too. Allan often has interesting notes that he adds as comments. From yesterday: So we passed the geographical centre of Canada today. Tomorrow morning (Friday), we will pass the halfway point in distance on the trip. That will be roughly in Fleming, a small town about 50 km across the border into Saskatchewan. The deer carcass was amazing. Diego was riveted to a big clump of fur in the grass. Once I saw a few clumps of fur, I realized they were everywhere. They had not been snowed on, so the deer had probably not been there more than a day. I did not see anything resembling a skull, but there was a bottom-half of a leg that looked untouched. Seeing that a few hours after the wolf was pretty cool. I love looking at maps and finding interesting town names. Here are a few from Manitoba: Overflowing River, Brokenhead, Tolstoi, Snowflake, Altamont. ... I found many more cool names in Saskatchewan, which I should save for tomorr...